The 10-year moving average line in red clearly shows warming from the early twentieth century, (the period 1910 to 1940) being very similar warming from the mid-1970s to the end of the series in both time period and magnitude. Maybe the later warming period is up to one-tenth of a degree Celsius greater than the earlier one. The period from 1850 to 1910 shows stasis or a little cooling, but with high variability. The period from the 1940s to the 1970s shows stasis or slight cooling, and low variability.

This is largely corroborated by HADCRUT4, or at least the version I downloaded in mid-2014.

Figure 2 – HADCRUT4 Global Temperature anomaly

HADCRUT4 estimates that the later warming period is about three-twentieths of a degree Celsius greater than the earlier period and that the recent warming is slightly less than the BEST data.

The reason for the close fit is obvious. 70% of the globe is ocean and for that BEST use the same HADSST dataset as HADCRUT4. Graphics of HADSST are a little hard to come by, but KevinC at skepticalscience usefully produced a comparison of the latest HADSST3 in 2012 with the previous version.

This shows the two periods having pretty much the same magnitudes of warming.

It is the land data where the differences lie. The BEST Global Land temperature trend is reproduced below.

Figure 4 – BEST Global Land Temperature anomaly

For BEST global land temperatures, the recent warming was much greater than the early twentieth-century warming. This implies that the sea surface temperatures showed pretty much the same warming in the two periods. But if greenhouse gases were responsible for a significant part of global warming then the warming for both land and sea would be greater after the mid-1970s than in the early twentieth century. Whilst there was a rise in GHG levels in the early twentieth century, it was less than in the period from 1945 to 1975, when there was no warming, and much less than the post-1975 when CO2 levels rose massively. Whilst there can be alternative explanations for the early twentieth-century warming and the subsequent lack of warming for 30 years (when the post-WW2 economic boom which led to a continual and accelerating rise in CO2 levels), without such explanations being clear and robust the attribution of post-1975 warming to rising GHG levels is undermined. It could be just unexplained natural variation.

However, as a preliminary to examining explanations of warming trends, as a beancounter, I believe it is first necessary to examine the robustness of the figures. In looking at temperature data in early 2015, one aspect that I found unsatisfactory with the NASA GISS temperature data was the zonal data. GISS usefully divide the data between 8 bands of latitude, which I have replicated as 7 year centred moving averages in Figure 5.

Figure 5 – NASA Gistemp zonal anomalies and the global anomaly

What is significant is that some of the regional anomalies are far greater in magnitude

The most Southerly is for 90S-64S, which is basically Antarctica, an area covering just under 5% of the globe. I found it odd that there should a temperature anomaly for the region from the 1880s, when there were no weather stations recording on the frozen continent until the mid-1950s. The nearest is Base Orcadas located at 60.8 S 44.7 W, or about 350km north of 64 S. I found that whilst the Base Orcadas temperature anomaly was extremely similar to the Antarctica Zonal anomaly in the period until 1950, it was quite dissimilar in the period after.

NASA Gistemp has attempted to infill the missing temperature anomaly data by using the nearest data available. However, in this case, Base Orcadas appears to climatically different than the average anomalies for Antarctica, and from the global average as well. The result of this is to effectively cancel out the impact of the massive warming in the Arctic on global average temperatures in the early twentieth century. A false assumption has effectively shrunk the early twentieth-century warming. The shrinkage will be small, but it undermines the NASA GISS being the best estimate of a global temperature anomaly given the limited data available.

Rather than saying that the whole exercise of determining a valid comparison the two warming periods since 1900 is useless, I will instead attempt to evaluate how much the lack of data impacts on the anomalies. To this end, in a series of posts, I intend to look at the HADCRUT4 anomaly data. This will be a top-down approach, looking at monthly anomalies for 5o by 5o grid cells from 1850 to 2017, available from the Met Office Hadley Centre Observation Datasets. An advantage over previous analyses is the inclusion of anomalies for the 70% of the globe covered by ocean. The focus will be on the relative magnitudes of the early twentieth-century and post-1975 warming periods. At this point in time, I have no real idea of the conclusions that can be drawn from the analysis of the data.

Temperature data 1900–2010 from meteorological stations across the world have been analyzed and it has been found that all land areas generally have two different valid temperature trends. Coastal stations and hill stations facing ocean winds are normally more warm-trended than the valley stations that are sheltered from dominant oceans winds.

Thus, we found that in any area with variation in the topography, we can divide the stations into the more warm trended ocean air-affected stations, and the more cold-trended ocean air-sheltered stations. We find that the distinction between ocean air-affected and ocean air-sheltered stations can be used to identify the influence of the oceans on land surface. We can then use this knowledge as a tool to better study climate variability on the land surface without the moderating effects of the ocean.

We find a lack of warming in the ocean air sheltered temperature data – with less impact of ocean temperature trends – after 1950. The lack of warming in the ocean air sheltered temperature trends after 1950 should be considered when evaluating the climatic effects of changes in the Earth’s atmospheric trace amounts of greenhouse gasses as well as variations in solar conditions.

More generally, the paper’s authors are saying that over fairly short distances temperature stations will show different climatic trends. This has a profound implication for temperature homogenization. From Venema et al 2012.

The most commonly used method to detect and remove the effects of artificial changes is the relative homogenization approach, which assumes that nearby stations are exposed to almost the same climate signal and that thus the differences between nearby stations can be utilized to detect inhomogeneities (Conrad and Pollak, 1950). In relative homogeneity testing, a candidate time series is compared to multiple surrounding stations either in a pairwise fashion or to a single composite reference time series computed for multiple nearby stations.

Lansner and Pederson are, by implication, demonstrating that the principle assumption on which homogenization is based (that nearby temperature stations are exposed to almost the same climatic signal) is not valid. As a result data homogenization will not only eliminate biases in the temperature data (such a measurement biases, impacts of station moves and the urban heat island effect where it impacts a minority of stations) but will also adjust out actual climatic trends. Where the climatic trends are localized and not replicated in surrounding areas, they will be eliminated by homogenization. What I found in early 2015 (following the examples of Paul Homewood, Euan Mearns and others) is that there are examples from all over the world where the data suggests that nearby temperature stations are exposed to different climatic signals. Data homogenization will, therefore, cause quite weird and unstable results. A number of posts were summarized in my post Defining “Temperature Homogenisation”. Paul Matthews at Cliscep corroborated this in his post of February 2017 “Instability og GHCN Adjustment Algorithm“.

During my attempts to understand the data, I also found that those who support AGW theory not only do not question their assumptions but also have strong shared beliefs in what the data ought to look like. One of the most significant in this context is a Climategate email sent on Mon, 12 Oct 2009 by Kevin Trenberth to Michael Mann of Hockey Stick fame, and copied to Phil Jones of the Hadley centre, Thomas Karl of NOAA, Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS, plus others.

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.(emphasis mine)

Homogenizing data a number of times, and evaluating the unstable results in the context of strongly-held beliefs will bring the trends evermore into line with those beliefs. There is no requirement for some sort of conspiracy behind deliberate data manipulation for this emerging pattern of adjustments. Indeed a conspiracy in terms of a group knowing the truth and deliberately perverting that evidence does not really apply. Another reason for the conspiracy not applying is the underlying purpose of homogenization. It is to allow that temperature station to be representative of the surrounding area. Without that, it would not be possible to compile an average for the surrounding area, from which the global average in constructed. It is this requirement, in the context of real climatic differences over relatively small areas, I would suggest leads to the deletions of “erroneous” data and the infilling of estimated data elsewhere.

The gradual bringing the temperature data sets into line will beliefs is most clearly shown in the NASA GISS temperature data adjustments. Climate4you produces regular updates of the adjustments since May 2008. Below is the March 2018 version.

The reduction of the 1910 to 1940 warming period (which is at odds with theory) and the increase in the post-1975 warming phase (which correlates with the rise in CO2) supports my contention of the influence of beliefs.